MacStories Weekly: Issue 109

In this issue: Productive, Alternatives to Apple’s Home App, Matthew Cassinelli’s Home screen, an interview with Riley Testut, plus the usual Workflow Corner, Weekly Q&A, Tip, Links, App Debuts, and recap of MacStories articles.

MACSTORIES RECOMMENDS

Great apps, accessories, gear, and media recommended by the MacStories team.

Productive

Federico

We all have things we wish we were better at, or at least more disciplined in following on a daily basis so they become a routine. For me, that’s exercising and remembering to be thankful for the job I have. Over the years, I tried to create todos for similar habits in my task manager, but ultimately I didn’t like having such personal goals intermixed with work projects and other repeating tasks. A few weeks ago, I set out to find a dedicated habit tracker that would work for me, and I settled on Productive.

Despite its GTD-sounding name, Productive is all about self-improvement and creating a daily habit routine you can stick with. The app is based on a simple premise: you can create morning, afternoon, and evening habits, giving each one its own repeating schedule. For example, you may want to exercise every day of the week except Sunday, or meditate every other day at 9 PM. You can set the app to have general reminders with a summary of all the habits you should follow for the day, or you can assign individual reminders with custom times and sounds to each habit. This flexibility allows you to scale back the amount of reminders the app sends you if it’s a particularly busy week, or alternatively ramp up the alerts if you feel like you need a stronger push.

What I like about Productive is its simplicity and bold look. Habits are displayed with large type and colors are used throughout the app to denote habit statuses and sub-sections. You can also assign custom icons to habits to make them stand out visually; they look great with the app’s dark theme. Productive tries not to overwhelm you with stats and numbers about your life, but if you want to, you can open a habit’s detail screen to view averages, streaks, and other week-by-week breakdowns, which I believe will prove useful over time as I keep using Productive.

Finally, the latest version of Productive brought iPad support to the app, which is also available on the Apple Watch and syncs with iCloud across all platforms. Productive is a subscription-based app: if you want to unlock unlimited habits, stats, trends, passcode lock, and controls for individual habit reminders, you’ll have to become a Premium member. I went with the Annual option.

There’s no shortage of great habit trackers on the App Store these days. I chose Productive because it works everywhere and its separation of morning/evening habits is ideal for my routine and lifestyle. As 2017 draws to a close and if you feel like you want to improve aspects of your life you’ve been neglecting, now would be a fantastic time to take Productive for a spin.

MACSTORIES COLLECTIONS

Alternatives to Apple’s Home App

John

Home

What I like most about Home is that surfaces HomeKit features that are buried deep within Apple’s Home app. Apple released its Home app after developer Matthias Hochgatterer released his, so the two confusingly share the same name and similar icons, but after you launch Hochgatterer’s app, the differences become obvious immediately.

Hochgatterer’s app follows the design trend of iOS 11 that Apple began using in the Music app with iOS 10. There are five tabs along the bottom of the main screen: a Home tab named with the home name you chose in Apple’s app, plus Services, Groups, Scenes, and Automation. As I detailed in my recent story about automating holiday lights, Groups is a buried HomeKit feature that shares some traits with Scenes, but has some advantages if you use Siri to activate smart home accessories. The Groups tab automatically organizes your accessories by type so you can control them that way or by setting up new groups that mix and match different types of devices.

The Services tab works a lot like Apple’s Home tab, splitting accessories across rooms in your home, as does the Automation tab, which has an analog in Apple’s app too. The Home tab though, is a one-stop shop that lists all your accessories, rooms, and zones in one place. Tapping any item listed here lets you drill down and control each individually with a high level of granularity that can be hard to achieve with Apple’s Home app.

Yeti

Yeti is a good choice if you want something simpler. Setting up devices to work with Yeti is easy because the app uses a wizard system with a clear and consistent UI that walks you through the process. The app is divided into three views that you swipe between: Charms, My House, and Routines. Charms are like Scenes in Apple’s Home app. They combine accessories into groups that can have their settings tweaked. My House lists all the accessories you’ve connected to the app, and Routines are actions based on conditions. For example, you could set your kitchen lights to come on every morning at a set time. The downside to Yeti is that doesn’t use HomeKit. As a result, Yeti supports fewer brands than HomeKit and you have to set up each device individually.

Wink

Wink takes an approach similar to Yeti’s. It creates a simple unified UI for disparate products and makes them work together. Wink calls its automations ‘Robots,’ which can be based on the time of day, the state of another connected home accessory, or your location. Wink also sells a hub that connects a variety of home automation products running on different standards like Zigbee, Z-Wave and others, which makes the app even more useful, though it is not a prerequisite to using the app.

Like Yeti, you need to set up each accessory you own using the Wink app because Wink is not using HomeKit to populate the app with your devices. One feature that the other apps in this collection don’t have is a log of the activity of your smart devices. If you’re out of town and want to ensure that your devices are working as expected, the log is a good way to monitor them. Wink also features Shortcuts, which are like Groups in Apple’s Home app.

Yonomi

Yonomi wins the prize for detecting the most devices on my home network automatically, which is handy since it too does not integrate with HomeKit. Of the apps in this collection, it’s the only one that supports Alexa and my Harmony Hub from Logitech. As with Yeti and Wink, you need to sign into your accounts for most of your devices. The app has a tabbed interface with tabs for ‘Things,’ which lists your accessories, and ‘Routines,’ which are actions that can be triggered by conditions like the time of day or your location. For example, you could set up a routine to turn off all your lights when you are away from home. Certain routines happen in the cloud, which has the advantage of allowing them to be triggered whether or not you are on your home network. Yonomi also comes with five built-in routines to give you an idea of what is possible. You can also mark Routines as favorites for quick access under the app’s first tab.

TIPS

Tips and tricks to master your apps and be more productive.

Subscribing to Google Calendars on iOS

John

It’s always an adventure to set up an iPhone as a new device. One of the most frustrating experiences I had this time around was setting up Google calendars. If you log into a Google account from the Accounts & Passwords section of the iOS Settings app, you can toggle Mail, Calendars, Contacts, and Notes on or off.

If you have a Google account that you don’t log into on an iOS device, you can still add a calendar associated with it, but the option is buried a little deeper in Settings and requires a trip to Google’s calendar settings. That’s exactly the problem I bumped up against when I set up my new iPhone X. I don’t use Apple’s Mail app for my personal Gmail account, so I didn’t add it under Accounts & Passwords. However, that meant the AppStories recording schedule calendar that Federico and I share didn’t show up in the Calendar app.

The solution is to open the Accounts & Settings section of Settings, tap ‘Add Account, and then ‘Other.’ In the Calendars section of the next view, tap ‘Add Subscribed Calendar.’ The next screen asks for a server, which can be found in the Google Calendar web app by selecting the calendar you want to add in the left-hand sidebar, clicking on the three dot menu, and choosing ‘Settings and sharing.’ Look for the ‘Secret address in iCal format,’ copy it and paste it into the Server field on your iOS device, tap next, add a user name and password if required, and finally ‘Save.’ Now your subscribed calendar should show up in the Apple Calendar app and any third-party calendar app that uses the iOS calendar framework.

SHORTCUTS CORNER

Get help and suggestions for your iOS shortcuts and productivity apps.

Member Requests

Question: I often find myself wanting to save tweets from Tweetbot into Dropbox. I am interested in saving the actual content of the tweets, which is sometimes just the actual text of the tweet, but which is often also an attached image (if the tweet has one). As best as I can tell, there is no easy way to get this content over to Dropbox in a clean, easy manner. Running a regular workflow seems to capture just the URL to that specific tweet, without the actual text of the tweet or attached image, if there is one. Clunky workarounds include having to copy the text of the tweet to the clipboard manually, and run a workflow using that as an input, and/or saving the tweeted image to my camera roll, and then running a workflow on that to get it where I want it. Neither of these options are ideal. Can you offer any help here? (Anonymous)

Federico

I’ve put something together that should accomplish what you need, but keep in mind the following limitations:

This is a workaround that uses Workflow’s ‘Article’ actions to effectively scrape the contents of a tweet. It might not always work reliably;
The workflow only supports extracting one image from a tweet;
You might run into odd encoding issues with HTML and plain text.

That said, I should say – this is a clever workaround to save the text and image of a tweet without having to write a workflow for the Twitter API. Using the action extension on a tweet shared from Tweetbot, the workflow grabs the tweet’s URL and uses the Get Name action to extract the title of the twitter.com webpage. This works well for us because Twitter uses the full text of a tweet as the webpage’s name. For instance, this tweet would look like this in Workflow after using Get Name:

CGP Grey on Twitter: "@viticci That's a real Remember the Milk blast from the past."

Obviously, this is problematic for a couple of reasons. The “[USER] on Twitter” bit is useless to us as we don’t need to save it alongside the tweet’s original text, and there’s some HTML garbage that we need to clean up too. I fixed this in an extremely crude way: some good old regex and a forced conversion from HTML to Rich Text then Markdown. It’s not elegant, but the end result is what we need: the actual text of the tweet itself.

That’s a real Remember the Milk blast from the past.

Some basic regex to clean up HTML returned by Workflow.

As for the image: I had to fake my way around extracting the image URL from the Twitter API using Workflow’s built-in Get Article action. The Get Article from Web Page action uses the tweet’s original URL to parse the page as an “article”, which we can then filter with Get Details of Articles to fetch the “main image URL” of the story. Of course, tweets aren’t articles and this is an unintended use case, but it works. If a tweet has an image, it’ll be returned as the main one; if it doesn’t, the author’s profile picture will be returned instead. You can preview the image extracted by Workflow with a Quick Look preview at the end.

Now, I’m not sure how you want to save tweets to your Dropbox account, so I left the workflow open for you to modify. There are three variables you can use: Tweet URL (a link), Tweet Text (plain text), and Tweet Image (an image file). My suggestion would be to add a menu after previewing the image so you can choose whether you want to use it not, or perhaps make two separate workflows – one for plain text tweets, the other for tweets with images. No matter what you end up choosing as final output, the three variables should include everything you need to archive tweets as links, text, and images elsewhere.

You can download the workflow here.

Question: I’d like to be able to get a URI to a file in the Files app (or even just iCloud Drive) that I can use as a reference in a text document on iOS. Imagine a note about a subject and I want to reference a PDF I have stored and accessible through Files (but I do not want to embed that PDF or even open it on Safari - I want to be able tap the reference link and open the file within the Files app). (Shawn Medero, @soypunk )

Federico

Unfortunately, there’s no way to generate a local URL scheme for a document stored in the Files app. However, the same method I described for Notes a few months back works with Files as well: you can share a file with yourself to generate an iCloud.com link you can tap to reopen a file in the app. I personally have a few launchers set up this way so I can open documents in Files from Launcher’s widget.

Question: I’ve been using the workflow Federico published in his iPad Diaries (in April) to save images to DEVONthink. Sometimes I need to save the photos to a specific group. I would love to know the solution (I think Federico mentioned he would elaborate on this enhancement but I haven’t heard it). (Philip)

Federico

I created an updated version of the workflow called Save DEVONimage Plus that asks you to pick a DEVONthink group to save images into.

To prepare the workflow for your needs, you’ll have to modify the first Dictionary action with the names of the groups you want to use alongside their IDs. You can get a group’s ID in DEVONthink by long-tapping a group then selecting Copy Item Link. The ID is the alphanumeric string at the end of the URL, which you need to paste next to the group name in the Dictionary.

Saving screenshots into a specific DEVONthink group with the Workflow extension in Photos.

The rest of the workflow works the same as before: you can share multiple images from the Workflow extension in Photos or pick them manually, and for each one you’ll be asked to enter an optional name and comment. This time, you’ll also be asked to pick a destination group for each image inside the Repeat Loop. I’ve been meaning to update my original workflow with support for specific groups, so thanks for your request, Philip. This will be useful for my app reviews going forward.

You can download the workflow here.

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WEEKLY Q&A

Your weekly correspondence with the MacStories team.

Question: What app would you recommend for editing audio files on an iPad Pro? (Jonathan)

John

The answer depends, in part, on what type of audio you want to edit. For music, Apple’s GarageBand is an excellent choice. If you’re editing spoken word audio like a podcast, Ferrite from Wooji Juice is very capable and has been used by podcasters like Jason Snell to edit a variety of podcasts. Another app made by Wooji Juice that I’d take a look at if you are editing music is Hokusai 2. I haven’t used it, but the app seems more geared towards music editing than Ferrite, and given the quality of Ferrite and reviews I’ve seen online, Hokusai appears to be a good option too.

Question: How can I reduce the file size of a PDF on iOS 11? (Rafael, @RafaelGMagia)

John

This is a feature I wish PDF viewer apps would add, but haven’t. A solution I found that works well is PDFOptim. The app’s UI is a little unusual, but it works as advertised. To test it, I took a relatively small PDF (just under 1 MB in size) and copied it from iCloud Drive. Files can also be added using iTunes transfer over a Lightning cable. With a PDF in the app, I tapped on it, which opens a preview of the document. Next, I tapped the ‘Optim’ button, which opens compression settings including Quality, Resolution, and RGB versus grayscale. Finally I tapped the big green Optimize button. At 50% quality, 72 DPI, and in grayscale, the PDF was still very readable but only 103 KB, a substantial reduction in size.

And now, a few questions about iOS 11’s Files app and how it deals with downloaded items:

Question: I’ve really enjoyed the Dropbox integration on iOS 11, but I’m confused about the way files are stored on my iPad. Dropbox is connected, so when I tap a file it downloads and opens. When I don’t need a local copy anymore, I can’t seem to delete it. There’s a delete button, but that deletes the file in Dropbox too. Am I missing something or is this a non-issue? (David, @xavdid)

Question: Is there a predictable rhyme or reason for when iOS 11 stores files for offline access? Every now and then I’m without Internet access and want store a few critical folders for offline access. (Mark Crump, @crumpy)

Question: Ryan, you mentioned the apparent randomness of files that auto-download in the Files app. From browsing folders of images, I figure it is any file under 1 MB that auto-downloads. Anything larger needs to be tapped to download. Note that the larger files sometimes (not always) get a thumbnail downloaded, but still have the cloud symbol.

But, worst of all, after downloading some of the larger files, you can revisit the folder some days later and… have to download them again! I guess the truth is in the cloud. (Allister, @zkarj)

Federico

All of this goes back to two main issues with the Files app in iOS 11: there’s no setting to say “always cache these documents offline” and there’s no button to purge a download but keep the downloadable version available for later. As Allister notes, it appears that Files auto-downloads smaller items when you’re browsing a folder, but in my experience even those might be removed from device after a few days. I understand that Apple wants to remove the complexity of managing what’s been already and what has to be downloaded, but, especially for those who work on the iPad, I wish there was a deeper degree of control over a file’s download status.

Question: For iPhone, iPad and Mac, which collection of apps and workflows do you use or suggest for collecting, organising and accessing (read, refer, revise) information? I’m learning about a range of topics (science, finance, apps, poetry, health, etc.) collecting quotes, excerpts, links, scans, entire articles, self-written notes from sources such as websites, books and magazines, both physical and digital. I had stuff all over the place but gotten just a little organised using Evernote (and DEVONthink to some extent). I already pay for a lot of stuff and would prefer to drop Evernote. (Umair)

Federico

I haven’t personally used these apps, but if you’re looking for professional research software that isn’t based on a subscription model, I would suggest taking a deeper look at DEVONthink Pro, Curio, or Keep It. The last one is the successor to the popular Together, and it offers a Mac app that you can buy at $50 from Reinvented Software’s website, as well as a powerful iOS counterpart that, however, uses subscriptions. Keep It for iOS is one of the apps I’m going to research and play around it over my holiday break.

Question: I really enjoyed your iPhone X review on MacStories – any chance you can share both of your wallpapers used? (Bernd)

Federico

On my Lock screen, I’m using what I believe used to be an iMac 5K wallpaper, which I rotated and adjusted for zoom. On the Home screen, I made a custom blurred wallpaper based off one of Stephen’s 5k classic OS X wallpapers. I uploaded both to Dropbox so everyone can download them.

Submit your own question

INTERESTING LINKS

Great reads and links from around the web.

Dave Nanian details how SuperDuper!, the macOS app for cloning your Mac’s boot drive, has been updated with APFS snapshots, which gives it Time Machine-like powers to roll back a drive to certain points in the past. (Link)

Gamasutra has an interesting interview with Francois Alliot, the developer behind Reigns and Reigns: Her Majesty, a game we reviewed last week. (Link)

TouchArcade has the details about an announcement by Simogo, the maker of several popular iOS games dating back to the earliest days of the App Store, that it will no longer make games for mobile. (Link)

Instagram announced the ability to follow hashtags on its photo sharing social network this week. (Link)

Motherboard reported that Google released a hacking tool to help security researchers find bugs in iOS 11, which got the attention of the jailbreak community who want to use it to jailbreak iOS 11. (Link)

The MIT Technology Review covered a gathering of AI experts who were treated to a sneak peak at some of Apple’s work on self-driving systems by Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Apple’s director of AI. (Link)

Gamasutra interviewed several game developers to get their take on Nintendo’s latest foray into mobile gaming, Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp. (Link)

Google Maps is adding a feature that provides detailed transit directions and monitors the status of your progress along the route, alerting you if you’re about to miss your stop. (Link)

Following last week’s new colors for Apple Watch bands and iPhone X cases, Apple has added Pink Fuchsia as color choice for the 10.5-inch iPad Pro Leather Sleeve and Apple Pencil Case, and a new Apple Watch Hermès band. (Link)

According to TechCrunch, Apple is widening the ban on apps created with commercialized templates and other app generation services. (Link)

Apple has open-sourced Turi Create, a framework that simplifies the development of custom machine learning models. (Link)

Ulysses’ Marcus Fehn looks back on what 2017 has meant for the company and previews some of the features coming next to the popular text editor. (Link)

Overkill is a new Mac utility that instantly kills iTunes when it opens itself without your input. (Link)

Apple has published an official list of all the airports and malls that support indoor maps in iOS 11. (Link)

Snap has released Lens Studio, a desktop app to create your own AR lenses for Snapchat. (Link)

Primate Labs, makers of Geekbench, are the new owners of VoodooPad, the wiki-style note-taking app for Mac. (Link)

Writing for Polygon, Julia Alexander reflects on the importance of Flappy Bird, which officially died in 2017 due to iOS 11’s 32-bit cut-off. (Link)

Canary will bring a feature called Person Detection to all Canary and Canary Flex devices, which will use machine learning to accurately identify people within a Canary video. (Link)

APP DEBUTS

Noteworthy new app releases and updates, handpicked by the MacStories team.

Federico

NewsBlur

The popular RSS service has been updated this week with a new feature called Infrequent Site Stories. Like the old Slow Feeds app, Infrequent Site Stories only shows you articles from low-volume subscriptions that don’t post too many items each month. I think this is a fantastic idea to deal with more focused publications living alongside high-volume sites in your RSS. The iOS app has also been updated with support for iOS 11 drag and drop and the iPhone X, plus a new theme manager that includes the San Francisco font.

Toggl

My favorite time-tracking service has released a new app (separate from the old one) that makes it easy to start new timers and restart old ones from your iPhone. There’s a lot missing still – no iPad version and no widget, for example – but this is a welcome reset of Toggl’s iOS presence. I like how clean the app looks and the ability to swipe up to see a log of previous timers.

Rest

We recently moved MacStories to a new server at MacStadium, and I needed to check whether the domain was redirecting to the new machine by checking for a specific string in the header of a GET request. I didn’t have to use a Mac with a Terminal for this thanks to Rest, an app that lets you make HTTP requests directly from iOS. Rest supports all common methods with URL parameters and headers, it allows you to inspect responses in more detail, and you can even add a request body in JSON format using a built-in editor. Rest supports iPad multitasking, has a dark theme, and it’s a great tool to have if you need to perform HTTP requests from iOS.

GIPHY

GIPHY’s latest update has turned the app into a GIF discovery and creation tool. You can now make your own GIFs by uploading videos from your library, which GIPHY will convert to GIF and make available for sharing through its website. In addition, the selection of stickers available in the iMessage app has been expanded, and you can see your recently sent GIFs and stickers below the search bar.

Concepts

This professional sketching and design app has been recently updated to version 5.0, which has introduced a brand new interface with a tool wheel that can be placed anywhere on the canvas and customized with different tools and color palettes. There’s a lot to discover and learn in Concepts – it’s a serious design tool with multiple In-App Purchase options and even a new Team functionality called Live Asset Sharing to share object packs and palettes with other users. Concepts is one of the apps I wish I needed in my workflow: it looks impressive on the iPad Pro, and it deeply integrates with iOS technologies such as drag and drop and Apple Pencil.

John

Little Ben

Little Ben is a clever Apple Watch utility that provides haptic feedback to mark the passage of time. You can have the app count minutes or hours. The app works in the background and out of sight on your wrist, which makes it a great option for public speakers and performers.

Time 2

The first version of Time, which we reviewed on MacStories, was a hit with students. Now the developers are back with a new version that looks great. Time is a task manager combined with a time tracker that keeps your feet to the fire. When adding a task, you set a length of time you think it will take to complete. When you start a task, the clock starts ticking putting pressure on you to finish the task before you reach the time goal you set. It’s a system that helps users get better at estimating what it takes to get something done and beat procrastination.

FEZ Pocket Edition

FEZ is one of my all-time favorite plaformers. The game has slowly but surely made its way onto virtually every gaming system. In a surprise this week, FEZ debuted on iOS. You play as Gomez, a fez-wearing creature exploring what seems like a 2D world at first. Not far into the game, however, you realize that you’re playing a classic platform game on the sides of a cube that can rotate. It’s a mind-bending twist that’s a lot of fun.

Onscreen controls work okay, but not great compared to a hardware controller. There’s a four-way directional pad on the left side of the screen and another set of buttons on the right for doing things like jumping and grabbing objects. Fortunately, FEZ supports MFi controllers, and if you have one, I recommend using it because the experience is much better. If you’re stuck with onscreen controls though, I found them to be easier to use on the iPad than the iPhone. Still, I prefer to play FEZ on my iPhone X because it looks and sounds amazing there. Perhaps because too few people have MFi controllers and using the remote would be too hard, FEZ is not available on the Apple TV, which is disappointing.

Dropbox Paper

Dropbox Paper, the company’s collaborative word processor and note-taking tool for teams, has received an updated this week that brought support for Split View on iPad and the ability to create todos from iOS. Paper is evolving into an intriguing alternative to Google Docs – John and I should probably give it a try for our AppStories show notes.

STRAW POLL

Opinions on Apple and technology generally, from Club MacStories members.

Vote in Straw Poll #21

Home Automation

Vote in Straw Poll #21

CLUB INTERVIEWS

A brief chat with friends of Club MacStories.

Riley Testut

Twitter: @rileytestut. Independent iOS developer, USC student.

You’ve released a Game Boy emulator for iOS called GBA4iOS and are working on a much bigger app called Delta to emulate Game Boy, SNES, and N64 games. How did you get started with emulation?

Around Christmas 2011, I came across a link on Twitter with instructions on how to sideload an open source SNES emulator called SNES (HD) onto iPads. I was incredibly excited to try it out, but I quickly realized my phone was the device that I really wanted to play games on, because I had it with me all the time. So, I tinkered with the code, and made a version of the app that would work on both iPhone and iPad. When I had finished, I decided to upload my modified version to GitHub so others could download and use it. I named it SNES4iOS, an homage to the jailbreak SNES emulator snes4iphone (which SNES-HD was itself based off of).

A few months later, I wondered if there were any other open source projects to let me play one of my favorite games of all time, Pokémon Emerald for the Game Boy Advance, on my iPhone. I was able to find a GitHub repo for gpSPhone, the jailbreak Game Boy Advance emulator, but unfortunately the code was several years old, and attempting to compile it with Xcode resulted in “999+” errors. I was determined to get it working, and although it took several months, by May 2012, I had finally hacked together a functional emulator, and uploaded this new project once again to GitHub under the name GBA4iOS. From that point on, I continued to tweak it and add features, and eventually decided to rewrite the entire app from scratch for GBA4iOS 2.0, which is the version people know today.

What are the biggest challenges of bringing classic Nintendo games to iOS?

By far the biggest challenge when working on iOS emulators has nothing to do with the actual development – it’s allowing people to install them. The emulator cores I’ve used for my projects have been developed and improved upon for years by extremely talented people, and as a result, porting them to iOS was mostly a straightforward, albeit time-consuming, process. Distributing the emulators, however, was a major issue, since the App Store does not allow unofficial game emulators. As someone who doesn’t enjoy jailbreaking their devices, I wanted a way to distribute these apps without requiring users to jailbreak. I initially thought this would be impossible, but by sheer luck, I was able to do just that.

My first stroke of luck came shortly after I put GBA4iOS on GitHub. A new service was announced called MacBuildServer, allowing anyone, not just developers, to install any open source iOS apps hosted on GitHub directly from their iOS device using enterprise certificates, which are normally used by companies to distribute internal apps to employees. I realized the service could be used to allow anyone to install GBA4iOS, so I promptly integrated the service. To my surprise, this caused GBA4iOS to blow up, ultimately resulting in MacBuildServer being shut down (whoops). This, in turn, prevented all existing copies of GBA4iOS from launching, even if they were already installed.

However, as it turned out, people were determined to play Game Boy games on their phones again, and that’s when my second stroke of luck came. Someone discovered that by setting the date on their iOS device back to before the certificate was revoked, GBA4iOS would magically work again. This method, creatively named the “Date Trick”, meant that GBA4iOS could still have a future, and became the official way to download and install GBA4iOS 2.0 directly from Safari onto any iOS device. This worked well for several months, but on October 7, 2014 (my birthday), Apple released an iOS 8.1 beta that fixed the security flaw the Date Trick relied on.

Distributing an app outside the App Store is a never-ending battle. Even if you find one solution, it’s almost guaranteed to be broken in the future. Despite this, there is incredible demand for apps outside of the App Store (especially emulators), and people are willing to put up with small inconveniences and workarounds to download them.

iOS controller schemes are very different than consoles. What’s it been like to adapt classic console controller inputs to iOS devices and accessories?

For GBA4iOS, I never really questioned the “best” way to adapt controller inputs to touch screens. The obvious solution of “translate all controller buttons to touch screen buttons” worked very well for the most popular game series played on GBA4iOS, Pokémon, due to its rather simple control scheme. I did, however, spend time adding support for Wario Ware: Twisted in GBA4iOS, where I used the phone’s gyroscope to simulate the motion adaptor used to play that game on a real Game Boy Advance, and that worked extremely well.

For Delta, SNES and N64 are not as easy to play with a touch screen, so I’ve had to get more creative on how to adapt the controls. One of the most notable features I added to compensate for this is what I call “Sustained Inputs”. Rather than requiring you to use one of your two available thumbs to hold down a button, Delta has the ability to virtually hold down (“sustain”) buttons on your behalf. This frees up your thumbs to be able to press other buttons, while having the sustained buttons act as if you were still holding them down.

N64 posed a much greater challenge in porting to a touch screen. Many games rely on being able to use your other fingers to press shoulder buttons at the same time as pressing buttons with your thumbs, and unlike SNES and GBA games, often it doesn’t make sense to have these shoulder buttons always held down via Sustained Inputs. As a result, my incredibly talented design partner Caroline Moore spent a lot of time figuring out the best way to allow for these controls with just using thumbs. As it turns out, a large number of these games require the Z button to be pressed at the same time as the A or B button, so we ended up adding special “ZA” and “ZB” buttons in addition to “A”, “B” and “Z”. It’s a simple enough idea, but it works.

Apple appears to remain interested in gaming on iOS. For example, they just introduced app pre-orders and announced this week that several big indie games are coming to iOS. Where do you see iOS gaming going?

While I think pre-orders are a great feature to add, I’m inclined to believe iOS gaming has plateaued in terms of what new things we can expect from games. That is, plenty of great games will continue to be released for the platform, but ultimately the ones that will truly have an impact (outside of tech circles) will be free games that are either ad-supported and/or have a plethora of In-App Purchases. Super Mario Run is a prime example of how even Nintendo’s most well known series is susceptible to complaints and pushback on paying for apps.

I’m not sure this is necessarily bad for iOS gaming, just that the future of iOS gaming is already here, and it’s free apps with ads and/or In-App Purchases. I was hopeful the Apple TV would have a noticeable impact on what types of games we can expect on iOS, but ultimately I don’t think it did. I would love more than anything to be proven wrong, however.

What are some of your favorite games on any platform?

I’m a Nintendo fan at heart, so most games I would consider my favorites are made by Nintendo. As mentioned before, Pokémon Emerald ranks right near the top, but if I were to choose my favorite Pokemon game of all time, that would have to be Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness for the GameCube, due to its very different approach to what a Pokemon game should be. My absolute favorite game of all time would have to go to Super Mario Galaxy for the Wii, simply because no other game has given me as incredible a sense of joy as manipulating gravity and blasting between planets on a mission to collect all 121 stars. That being said, I am currently playing Super Mario Odyssey for the Switch and it’s incredible, so I’ll have to see how it fares once I’ve collected all the freaking power moons.

The one exception from my Nintendo-packed favorite game line-up would be the entire Kingdom Hearts series. I’ve loved the games ever since getting a PS2 and the original Kingdom Hearts for Christmas years and years ago, and continue to play the games today (thanks to the PS4 remakes). I’m anxiously awaiting Kingdom Hearts 3, and when it is finally out next year I will 100% be playing it non-stop.

What are your plans for Delta?

My goal for Delta is for it to be the destination for all classic emulation on iOS. In the beginning I planned for it to be an emulator that supported SNES, Game Boy, and Game Boy Advance games, but as I worked on it I realized I wanted to try my hand at a new system, which is why I’ve decided to support N64 games as well. Furthermore, I’m devoted to making the experience incredible for all systems, building upon the strengths of GBA4iOS, while fixing what I felt were its weaknesses. After the initial release, I plan to add more systems as well, especially as iOS devices continue to become dramatically more powerful each generation.

Of course, while working on Delta, I knew I had to figure out a way to release it, especially now that jailbreaking is all but dead. I wanted a solution that was easy to use, but also wouldn’t be as vulnerable to being shut down by Apple as the Date Trick. It took some significant effort, but I believe Caroline and I have figured out how, and that’s really exciting. That being said, I’m intentionally not saying much about it yet so I don’t accidentally ruin it before Delta is even finished.

Ultimately, I think of Delta as the culmination to my iOS emulator journey I started six years ago with SNES4iOS. I came across iOS emulation by accident, but now all these years later I believe it’s time for me to release the best emulator I possibly can, and move on to the next thing. Thankfully, I have an idea of what this next thing is, and I’m extremely excited about it. The best part is that while Delta is the end of this journey, it will actually be the beginning of my next, which I’m excited to share when the time comes. For all these reasons, Delta is an extremely important project, and I can’t wait for everyone to be able to use it.

HOME SCREENS

Friends of MacStories share their iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch Home screens.

Matthew Cassinelli

Twitter: @mattcassinelli. Independent creator and former member of the Workflow team at Apple .

I used to work at Workflow, and then Apple, and now I’ve left to work as a freelancer. I’m writing about technology on my own now, plus I’m available to work on other creative or marketing projects.

My lock screen background is a photo I took of the Berkeley shoreline.

Workflow changed how I think about iOS. After creating hundreds of workflows, the visual appeal of my Home screen became less important than what I can do at any moment. Having so much functionality available in so many ways reframed what is possible with each Apple device I own, and as I got further into it my Home screen got worse and worse. But after some time and experimentation, I’ve landed on a setup that suits my needs quite well.

The Widgets

I’ve optimized my widgets for glanceable information and quick actions while I’m working from home.

Activity is there since I want to keep up with how lazy I’m being, but it’s at the top so I can quickly scroll away from that dark background. Weather Line and Swarm help me remember to venture outside for walks and check in when I actually go places. Overcast is right in the middle so I can quickly start a podcast when it’s fallen out of the Now Playing widget, and Things is there to remind me to start working again.

The Workflow widget is there to execute a variety of quick tasks. Here’s my fully expanded Workflow widget, with links to each workflow:

Log Water/Caffeine: this executes Log Water and Log Caffeine so I can quickly enter data into Health.
Open Twitter Lists: this uses my List names to generate deep links into the Twitter app.
Save to Instapaper: lets me choose where to save a link in Instapaper.
Open In Safari: useful for skipping in-app browsers.
Search for Link: so I can search for what people are saying about an article on Twitter.
URL to Tweetbot: lets me add text to a link before sending it to Tweetbot.
Play Top Rated: shuffles songs I’ve marked as 4 stars or above.
Quick Playlist: shuffles 25 random songs I’ve listened to in the last month.
Biking Directions: opens Google Maps to biking directions, which also applies to electric skateboards.
Save Inspiration: lets me collect ideas for my photography projects from Instagram into a folder in Photos.
Laundry Timer: a classic workflow that’s great on the Watch.
Random Records: Probably my favorite workflow right now, this calls the Airtable API for the database of my vinyl records I’ve created and pulls 5 random albums to listen to. Once I choose one, it tells me the sort order we use so I can find it on my shelf (my girlfriend has a very particular method where solo artists are sorted by last name). Saves me from the Paradox of Choice so I can keep putting new records on while I’m working.
Golden Hour: grabs the sunrise/sunset from Dark Sky, then shifts them for the best times to shoot photos.
Calculate Tip: another great Watch workflow.
Search 1Password: pick from common passwords (Gmail, Apple ID) or just open the app.
Open Audio App: launch into into Overcast, Music, Spotify, Sonos, Shazam, Noon Pacific, or SoundCloud quickly.
Genre Curators: opens a deep link into each of the genre pages buried in Apple Music.
Copy Top Emoji: quick access my favorite emoji. The team added the “Every Character” option to Split Text as a feature because I wanted to build this workflow
Instagram Hashtags: select multiple hashtags to add to posts. Worth having so I can pull down the widget while in Instagram and jump into Workflow quickly.
Add Video Idea: logs new ideas for my upcoming video project into Airtable
Airtable APIs: stores bookmarks for Airtable documentation so I can quickly debug my API workflows.
Run Workflow: this is a nuts workflow that iterates through all of your workflows right in the widget, but I don’t remember who made it.
Copy Today’s Date: lets me choose from the different ways to display today’s date and copy it to the clipboard.

The Home Screen

My Home screen apps are organized by both usage & access with my right thumb, then by color. I generally kept a theme by row (folders, photos, social, work) and gave the most important/most used priority in the dock.

My background is a design I found on Twitter a few weeks ago – if you know who made it, let me know!

GTD

Workflow is the first app in my dock, because it’s insane how much I’ve used it. I’ve built hundreds of workflows, published a significant portion of the content in the Gallery, and wrote the official Workflow documentation during my time there.

Next is Ulysses, which has been my go-to editor for a while now – I used it to write the copy for Workflow’s website as well as the documentation. I do wish it was easier to generate the sheet URL/identifier on iOS though, or make them at all on the Mac.

About 50% of the time I open my phone, I’m opening Drafts and typing something immediately. My most-used action simply splits the draft by line and sends them to Reminders, so that I can open Things and auto-import them to my inbox. Go listen to the episode of Vector with Greg Pierce and Merlin Mann if you haven’t yet.

You may be wondering why I use Things, Clear, and OmniFocus. Things is beautiful to use and has helped me properly maintain a to-do list better than any other app. But since I organize it by Area, I’ll regularly have a large list of things marked for Today but no way of deciding what to do next. So I started adding my immediate to-dos into Clear where I can check them off as I go about my day. I can refer back to Things at the end of the day and keep my to-do list maintained, while saving OmniFocus for larger actual projects that require step-by-step planning with its nested lists and TaskPaper input. For me, each achieves its specific goal best, so why not use all three?

MindNode is a gorgeous and functional mind-mapping tool that I’ve been using for years now. I utilized it to capture the Workflow team’s brainstorm ideas for the updated Gallery last fall, and the latest update is super slick on the Apple Watch – I recommend you check it out.

Files is nearby so I can access Recent documents I’ve saved in the /Workflow/ folder or across iCloud.

Fantastical is my calendar app of choice, with robust natural language entry, a great design that lets to see all my recurring reminders and events (even calendar weeks!), and a handy Mac menu bar counterpart.

Photos

Lightroom CC made it on my Home screen after their latest updates – it’s pretty insane to take some RAW photos, upload them with my laptop, make some tweaks on my phone out on a walk, edit it in detail on the couch with my iPad, then switch to my iMac for final touches later on.

VSCO is nearby for quicker edits and access to the VSCO X filters, but I have the VSCO Mobile 1 and 2 presets synced into Lightroom already. I also use VSCO Film Toolkit which is super handy on mobile, but it seems like they’ve discontinued it.

Instagram is an interesting beast and a social network I enjoy a lot. Stories revitalized the platform and lowered the barrier to entry – now that they’re auto-saved and you can put Highlights on your profile, I expect to see a lot more participation this year.

Adding the ability to follow hashtags in your Instagram feed is another monumental change whose impact I’m only starting to wrap my head around. It’s fascinating to watch the platform change so much and yet still be a damn good place to share with other people.

Reading

I’ve come to use Reeder > Safari’s Reading List > Instapaper as my workflow for articles. RSS comes in through Reeder, which I send to Reading List, unless something is longer where it then goes straight to Instapaper. Anything I come across on Twitter or newsletters in Mail go to Reading List as well, which I then open up a few times a day and read through with Reader Mode on.

Both Reeder and Safari have a fantastic scrolling mode where once you’re done with an article, it rubber-bands down to the next one in the list. While I hate this on individual news website, the feature is fantastic for consuming feeds of articles quickly and helps alleviate the effort of manually archiving one and picking the next.

I use Instapaper for its excellent design, because they keep up-to-date with features, and because separating out by folders worked better for me than an endless list of tagged articles in Pocket. However, I wish you could keep archives for folders instead of everything going into the same bin.

Occasionally I’ll take an article and use Instapaper’s Send to my Kindle bookmarklet, which I’ve been testing for a truly no-distraction reading experience (set it up in your Instapaper settings).

The Socials

YouTube is the most interesting social network out there, and earlier this year I realized I didn’t understand it well enough. I put it on my Home screen, signed up for YouTube Red to avoid ads, and never looked back. I’ll watch it on my phone with my AirPods, on the TV using AirPlay or in 4K via Chromecast, or in Picture-in-Picture on my iPad and Macs. I watch popular tech YouTubers to get a better feel of how they make their videos, keep up with a few vloggers, and watch a lot of tutorials (use 1.5x speed – it’s worth the weird audio).

I use Tweetbot and Twitter interchangeably, so I just keep them available and pick whatever feels right in the moment. Tweetbot has fantastic design, the sync and Lists are key to keeping up with specific crowds, and muting has been invaluable thanks to US politics. However, Twitter has a better media experience, I like the social proof of engagement right on the tweets, and I’m actually a regular user of Twitter Explore and Moments.

Folders

Many tend to eschew putting folders on Home screen as clutter, but I find they’re worth it for the categorization and density benefits. Many of the titles align with goals in my life – I want to travel, shoot, create, and yeah, I want to consume stuff too – so it’s nice to have them laid out clearly at the top each time I open my device.

I also find it an impossible task to try to simplify my Home screen down to just one app for a whole category. The App Store is full of useful tools that deserve a chance to get used – burying them inside an unused folder on the third page guarantees they won’t. Right now I have 55 apps I utilize regularly available at my fingertips, reminding me of their presence and giving me better access to the deep functionality my iPhone provides.

Create

I’m one of the moderators on the /r/Workflow subreddit, so I’ve been taking advantage of the fantastic Apollo lately. I didn’t participate in the community much before, so I’m looking to be more present now and start posting new workflows there myself.

WordPress helps me manage my website, which I’ve just began posting to now that I’m independent. I’m building a set of workflows soon to smooth out the posting process.

Launch Center Pro is the best way to schedule workflows, either by time or around a location. I get notified to run Log Caffeine/Water workflow every day at 9 AM because I keep forgetting to log my morning coffee.

I’m using Mail after being indoctrinated at my last job, and I’ve turned notifications back on in an attempt to clear them out or unsubscribe as they come in. My strategy for newsletters is to tap on the “Click here to download images” at the top of most emails and save the link to Reading List for later, then archive the email.

Creator is the purest Facebook experience right now, only letting you post or check notifications related directly to you. It’s shockingly similar to what Facebook originally was before it mutated into the beast it is today – you just post or check your “wall”, albeit this time with robust analytics.

I’ve begun using Pinterest and Tumblr actively for work rather than burying them in a social folder. Pinterest finally became useful once I started pinning to product photography boards – and once I turned off notifications. Tumblr is still the best free blogging platform, as it generates an RSS feed, has tags, and most importantly integrates with Workflow. I’m considering creating a firehose blog that posts new workflows I create.

Sketch Mirror just recently made an appearance as I’m using it to view sample images I’m creating for future Workflow-related content. My specialty is social media marketing, so I’m a big believer in viewing what you’re making on the same devices where people will consume it.

Airtable is my secret weapon, an endlessly-customizable web database with an open API that I can hook right into Workflow. There’s so much potential it’s easy for me to get lost down rabbit holes, so I’m making some time soon to apply it more deliberately.

Consume

Overcast is right in the middle because I jump into it all the time throughout the day, with Spotify and Music are on either side battling for my ears. Noon Pacific finds relaxing electronic beats and releases new sets every day at noon – I’ve been listening to their mixes for years (requires Spotify Premium).

Anchor is under-used, but I’m intrigued by its premise and I’ve considered doing daily Anchors about Workflow. The segments are like podcast chapters, the audio creation tools seem easy, and you can export to Apple Podcasts if you want too. That being said, it needs some work on discovering segments beyond the last 24 hours.

iBooks and Kindle are there out of aspiration because, let’s face it, I already spend way to much time doing everything else on my phone. But eventually, I swear I’ll read some books again. Right after I play more Rocket League on the Switch (friend code: SW-1219-3483-2610).

Sonos is great with the Apple Watch because you can control the music right from your wrist. I’ve used it with friends over and could instantly turn down the volume when I needed to. Needless to say, I’m excited for HomePod and AirPlay 2 to get here.

Shoot

Since I started practicing photography intentionally this past year, I’ve been testing out RAW capture camera apps. Halide’s notch details for the iPhone X are chef kissing fingers and their articles have been super informative, but I’ve been appreciating how Obscura’s design helps me pay attention to ISO and Shutter Speed.

I want to use RAW Power & Focos, so I keep them in the lower row where the new icons will catch my eye. OK Video is super useful for shooting vertical videos – which may make you cringe – but you can up your Instagram Stories game and make multi-shot clips super easily with this free little app.

I use the Panasonic Image App to connect to my GH-5 via Bluetooth, which lets me track the location of my photos from my phone. And I use Best Photos to keep track of favorites and delete all the missed shots.

Slow Fast Slow from Studio Neat is great for testing the capabilities of the iPhone X, letting you speed up and slow down different portions of the clip as you desire. I use their Glif and the wood handle/wrist strap for stabilization while shooting too (which lets me mount a Rode microphone on top to record high-quality audio with 4K video right on the iPhone).

Over the summer, I shot a few test videos using my iPhone rig for trips like Alcatraz and a visit to SFMOMA, then used Memories in Photos to generate videos for each of them – and they were fantastic. The scene-detection was great, the music was way better than whatever tune I probably would have found, and I legitimately found myself both crying with laughter and getting emotional from the results. If you haven’t tried it yet, try shooting a a video for a full day and seeing what Photos comes up with – I bet you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Travel

My travel apps are organized by directions, on-location, and vehicle. Maps are on the top, Swarm in is the middle so I remember to check in, and weather is on either side of that so I’m able to be prepared (Mr. Chilly for the Bay Area). Transportation options are at the bottom – I bought an annual pass for FordGoBike so I can get around the hundreds of stations in the Bay Area, the MySubaru app lets me unlock my car, and the Boosted Board app tracks how much & far I ride around Berkeley.

Page 2 Honorable Mentions

Since this is already way too long, here are some useful apps on my second page.

Utilities

Tally, myNoise (Gregorian chants, seriously), CleanText (thanks Gabe), PCalc (my favorite game), Simbol for special characters (which I could probably copy as a workflow), and Recents (just a reverse-chronological list of your new contacts).

Drones

UAV Forecast, Rego Pro (for tracking good locations, thanks David), DroneBase Pilot (still need to try their “Minecraft” AR feature), AirMap, DJI GO 4, Google Earth (for planning shots)

iPad Home Screen

My background is a drone photo of San Francisco that I took from above my house in Berkeley.

It is interesting how my iPad Home screen has become much more of a challenge lately thanks to the dock and iOS 11. I’ve seen sentiment around “I miss my Home screen”, because one spend so much time already in an app or opening the dock or switching with Spotlight. I took this concept and used it by design, making the dock my work area in “laptop mode” and the Home screen a different type of landing page for “tablet mode”.

Laptop Mode

Sneak peak at my iPad’s second page, mostly used for games).

When the keyboard is attached, I can use the Dock, Spotlight, Command-Tab, and widgets to get all my work done and rarely go home until I’m done.

The same apps that are in my iPhone dock live on the bottom right of my iPad dock, since these are the easiest to reach. When I’m not typing I usually rest my hands on either side of the iPad, sneaking two fingers into the space behind the cover and two above it on the back of the device. This way my wrists are resting and my thumb swing left to hit those four apps + my recents, plus it can reach up to hit the Home button. I put my productivity folder in there as well so I didn’t have to jump to the Home screen for it and I could open it with my left thumb.

Almost all of these apps I use in Split Mode regularly as well – I wrote this article in Ulysses with my outline next to it in MindNode, using Photos as a popover to reference my screenshots. CornerTube is the only non-split screen app in there, but that’s okay because it’s purely designed to take a YouTube link and open it in a Picture-in-Picture window.

Tablet Mode

I’ve taken to pulling the keyboard off more often when I don’t need it and using my iPad in portrait. I might pace around the house, where I do things like read or watch a video, or I might grab the Apple Pencil and edit a photo or make a quick note for later.

This also gels well with the software/hardware limitations of the Apple Pencil – you can’t go to the Home screen with a keyboard shortcut or swipe up from the edge to the dock. When I’m holding the Pencil and the keyboard is detached, I go home via the button or the five finger swipe and I’m taken back to a set of apps on the Home screen all tasks where I don’t necessarily use the keyboard.

Plus, I managed to get my apps arranged so they look good in both landscape and portait.

I’m sure a lot of my specific arrangements for my iPhone, iPad, and widgets will change over time, as I’ve been changing and growing all the time. But my strategies for quick access, visible presence and organization of apps, and integrations with Workflow will remain constant.

Combine all this with the opportunities of the Mac and the convenience of my AirPods and Apple Watch (hopefully soon the HomePod too), and I’d say it’s a pretty damn fun time to take advantage of these gadgets on a daily basis.

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